Category Archives: Eat Local Challenge

I was a studio art major in college, and I stuck basically with two dimensions because the priest who taught the ceramics and sculpture department was terribly intimidating. Ever since then, I have been a frustrated potter! I finally tapped the urge last summer and took my first ceramics class at the local museum. It’s been a blast, most especially because I AM AWFUL. Truly. Being absolutely bad at something yet still being able to enjoy myself immensely…all new territory for me. No perfectionism, no fear of failure: embrace the suck! It is so liberating!

My first teacher asked us what we were expecting to achieve in her class. “Making a cassole,” I said, when it was my turn.

I never did accomplish that, so I bribed my second teacher into making one for me. Although he didn’t completely follow my exacting instructions, it’s a beautiful pot. And tonight’s meal? Cassoulet, bien sur.

I am a bit confused: it appears the Challenge ends on 31 March. I thought it was a by-the-week thing, therefore ending at week 20. I had big plans (BIG!) for the last week’s meal…the last of the Dark Days Challenge of eating sustainably, organically, locally and/or ethically for one meal per week all winter long. Maybe I will post the meal next week anyway: it has a lot of wacky goodness in it.

So I thought for this week’s Week 19 I would simply feature a meal sourced from home ingredients grown JUST this year (2010) but…inspiration hit me. Literally! My bag of saved corn husks from our home-grown popcorn dropped on my head from the top shelf when I was adjusting things in the pantry. Luckily, corn husks aren’t heavy.

Brown paper packages tied up with string: not pretty, not numerous, but…tasty and mostly home-grown

When I was in college, one of my best friends was a first-generation Mexican American whose people hailed from Oaxaca. Homesickness for his mother’s Phoenix kitchen had us trolling for chow in the local Mexican restaurants…but he assured me the comida plated up in our Midwestern college town was but a simulacrum of honest food. Well, I visited him, often, and he was so right! And once, just once, I was fortunate enough to sample the tamales lovingly (painstakingly) made by his Mama and Abuelita. “Labor of love” barely describes the ordeal undertaken by these women, both tiny things, in Mama Maria’s small un-airconditioned kitchen. They would make 250 in a day, some for family, but most for their church…and they did this twice a month!

I can’t begin to scale up to that level, but with home-grown and local ingredients I can make an attempt at making at least a few. I did have some cinnamon-laced Mexican chocolate brought back from a friend; why not make mole as well?

Okay. That WAS a bit of a labor of love. But: I made the mole last weekend, the pork was leftovers from Wednesday night, and the chicken is terribly easy to cook. With able small hands to help stuff and wrap, this was a fun meal to make and eat.

Two more weeks in the Challenge! And I am beginning to see the end of the Dark Days, myself; harbingers of spring are everywhere around me now. There’s no denying it (and Daylight Savings helps).

This week’s meal was fairly boring, but: if my husband and daughter had their way, we would have this every. single. day. and not just every week. And excepting the flour in the bread, everything else was grown and raised on this little piece of land of ours. We had a friend over and there was much wine involved so no photos were taken of the spread itself; luckily, dinner tonight is soup from last night’s carcass…all the better to cure the hangover I truly have right now. Ay.

Five more weeks to go in this challenge! I am wondering if the Dark Days will truly end then…and is spring truly around the corner? With new snow falling daily here, I am highly dubious.

To fit with the stereotype that all that can be eaten in winter are dull root veggies and cabbage, this week’s meal features…cabbage!

Slug-tattered but highly edible

In my quest to end root-cellaring certain items, I planted cabbage seedlings into one 3’x6′ greenhouse bed in early September. I had just cleared it of its blooming lettuces, so I figured I would transplant about 12 and see if they made it through the winter. (The twenty-odd other seedlings got transplanted outside and harvested while still small (3-4″ diameter) until the snow came and stayed in December. This size, incidentally, is perfect for our small family: not practical for kraut, maybe, but no waste.) Well, the greenhouse cabbages did make it. In fact, they continued to grow throughout the winter. These were Des Vertus Savoy, a somewhat crinkly cabbage that can reach 5 lb. easily. So, my root cellar this year houses ONLY potatoes! No root veg, no cabbage. Apples and pears on the back porch. Whew, that was easy.

Half of my family hails from the Lake Michigan coast of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Both sides of my dad’s family had long history up there, mainly on islands of both Lake Michigan and Lake Huron as they were all fisherfolk if they weren’t lumberjacks. This is knowledge that comes to me, incidentally, from my own genealogical research and not family yore: Dad wanted nothing to do with his family and died when I was 13, so all tales and secrets and recipes died with him. Suffice it to say I have since filled in a lot of blanks, and I would hope that at least one or two of my ancestors had a recipe for pasty up their sleeves. If not they, then loads of other Yoopers know how to make them.

These are basically meat-and potato-filled turnovers. The typical recipe includes rutabagas, and so I did as well; carrots, celery, onion…no other spices other than salt/pepper is customary but, well, I adore my spices and so added a few. Supposedly these lunchbox pastries hail from the Cornwall-born coal- and copper miners who worked the U.P.’s northwestern mines in the late 19th century. Now you cannot drive 30 miles on any major road in the whole peninsula without hitting a tourist-y eatery that sells PASTIES (all caps always).

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Wisdom from the sage

Wendell Berry:

"We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it."
--from an essay in "The Long-Legged House"

"The word agriculture, after all, does not mean "agriscience," much less "agribusiness." It means "cultivation of land." And cultivation is at the root of the sense both of culture and of cult. The ideas of tillage and worship are thus joined in culture. And these words all come from an Indo-European root meaning both "to revolve" and "to dwell." To live, to survive on the earth, to care for the soil, and to worship, all are bound at the root to the idea of a cycle. It is only by understanding the cultural complexity and largeness of the concept of agriculture that we can see the threatening diminishments implied by the term "agribusiness."

"Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating."
--both the above are from essays in "The Art of the Commonplace: Agrarian Essays"

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Is this so hard to believe?

"An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor, or Ba'al, or The Golden Calf. As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further," Richard Dawkins, 2002.